The old-fashioned way
Net companies increasing advertising
A lot richer, to hear Mel Karmazin tell it. "We're seeing new advertisers come into all of radio," the CEO of CBS Corp. told analysts in a conference call Thursday. "But our largest single category has been new media."
Karmazin was speaking in his alternate role of chairman and CEO Infinity Broadcasting, the recent spinoff of radio assets in which CBS maintains an 82% stake.
But his sentiments echoed those spoken a day earlier by Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, who also identified the Internet as a burgeoning source of ad revenues for TW's old-as-Time media panoply.
Karmazin and Levin are not alone. As Paul Sweeney and Christopher Ensley, broadcasting analysts at Salomon Smith Barney, noted in a recent report: "All of our radio, TV and outdoor companies reported that Internet companies are beginning to significantly increase advertising expenditures on traditional media." "I'm not surprised," responded Bob Coen, the director of forecasting at global ad-agency McCann-Erickson, who likened a new Web site to a store's opening in some giant neighborhood mall.
"You've got to tell people where to go," he said. "You've got to do something to get traffic to the location."
Many Web sites consider limiting their advertising to the Web alone as preaching to the converted. Thus their rush into more traditional media, especially as nascent Web sites seek to brand themselves and, by doing so, render their infant competitors also-rans.
